


the gift

by isawet



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Gender or Sex Swap, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-08
Updated: 2015-10-08
Packaged: 2018-04-25 10:32:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4956898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isawet/pseuds/isawet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles has a baby that isn't hers, which she knows--most of the time.</p><p>Always a girl Stiles, faerie magic afoot, and some solid Sterek foundational work.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the gift

**Author's Note:**

> I am so done writing this--it has taken SO LONG
> 
> I do not have a beta, and I will fix errors as I become aware of them. Please let me know if you spot something that doesn't make sense, or a typo, or anything!
> 
> Also, there is a scene in which one character is worried a sexual assault has occurred, but is incorrect. Even so, please avoid if that will trigger you. Thanks!

Stiles wakes up to a baby crying in her ear. Well--not in her ear, but it might as well be, the three feet from her bed to the crib challenging the fact that light travels faster than sound. She jerks upright, drool drying on her cheek and makes alarmed noises until the light flickers on in the hallway.

“I got this one,” her dad says, creaking open the door and crossing the room. He’s in his uniform, coming back from a late shift. The alarm clock by her bed blinks 3:00am in short red dashes. 

“Guh,” Stiles says, and wipes at her mouth with the back of one hand.

“Hi grandbaby,” her dad coos. _coos_. Stiles accidentally lets another string of drool out in her shock. He lifts the baby out of the crib and cuddles her to his chest, murmuring. “who’s a good grandbaby? Who?”

The baby settles, one tiny arm stretching out. Her dad bites at it, playful. “Dad,” Stiles says very seriously, her brain kicking in once the sharp drill of infant screaming has ceased, “that is not my baby.”

Her dad laughs. “All babies cry, Stiles, it doesn’t mean you can disown them.”

Stiles read once that when you’re dreaming, your mind can’t full form delicate complicated limbs, like fingers and toes. She counts both twice and concludes with mounting hysteria that she is not asleep. That’s fine, Stiles thinks. I was once chased by a classmate who was also a murdering lizard with paralytic drool. Sudden baby is not that bad. All she has to do is call Scott, run around like a couple of frantic chickens, and wait for Deaton to tell them how to get rid of it. It’s nothing she can’t handle calmly and efficiently. “I do _not have a baby_ ,” she shrieks.

Her dad rolls his eyes. “Aren’t we a little past this denial?” He walks to the bed and deposits the baby in Stiles’ arms. “You used to drive your mom crazy,” he says softly, and runs a fingertip over the tiny tuft of downy hair that sprouts unruly from the top of the baby’s head. “Perfectly behaved all day until she wanted to sleep, and then nothing but wailing.”

Her dad talking about her mom brings up the lump in Stiles’ throat it always does, and she sits there, holding this baby she _has never seen before_ , while her father kisses the baby’s forehead, pats her on the cheek and leaves. She sits very still while he walks back to his room, looking around the room and seeing: baby toys. Bottles. Diapers. A diaper table. A diaper dispensary. More toys. The crib. The bookshelf that used to store her comic books is now home to baby powder and ‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting’ and a picture of a pregnant girl Stiles is refusing to acknowledge is herself. The door to her dad’s room closes and she jerks into motion, rushing to her desk, to the laptop. There are pictures of her on the desk, pregnant. There’s a framed photo of the baby in a newborn’s blanket, looking like a wrinkled troll, cradled in Stiles’ arms. In the picture, Stiles is in a hospital bed, sweaty and pale and smiling.

Stiles returns to the bed to hyperventilate. She fumbles her phone off the bedside charger and texts Scott in all caps. Then she lies down on her side and puts the baby on its back (his? it’s wearing a blue onesie) on the mattress beside her. It stares back at her, gurgling, and Stiles feels a panic attack coming on. She pulls the blanket over her head and tries to ignore the baby. She spends five seconds obsessing over SIDS and imagining the baby rolling off the bed before she pulls the blanket off, tugs the baby gently closer and pulling the blanket over both their heads.

“Mhh,” the baby grunts. Stiles feels an intense urge to vomit and takes deep breaths until it’s mostly gone. She remembers seeing a story on the news about how baby heads are really soft and if you let them lie on their backs too long the back of their head will go flat. She turns the baby on its side and uses a pillow to prop it gently from the side.

“Just because you’re not my baby doesn’t mean you should have a flat head,” she whispers. The baby gurgles again, eyes slipping shut. The tiny chest rises and falls. “What if your name is Phillip?” Stiles continues, letting the familiar sound of her own babble calm her. “You can’t be named Philip _and_ have a flat head. The woodshop kids will make fun of you.”

Her window slides open and closed with a soft thump. Scott’s feet scratch against her carpet. Stiles sits up, careful to pull the blanket off gently and not drag it across the baby’s face. Scott in full Alpha mode greets her, his eyes glowing red and his teeth elongated. He growls, and drags his nose across her collarbone, scenting. Stiles lets him, and after another scan of the room he shifts back to fully human, but all his muscles are tensed, almost vibrating.

“What the hell, Stiles, I thought you were under attack.”

“I am,” Stiles hisses, and gestures at the baby, who is now very slightly snoring. Scott glares at her.

“Your text said BABY SOS,” he says reproachfully, “you know I don’t mind helping you with Dawn but I thought someone had taken her.”

Stiles thinks his sentence through very carefully. She tries to rearrange the words into a sentence that actually makes sense. It doesn’t work. “This is not my baby,” she says finally. 

Scott’s eyes widen. He scoops up the baby and noses at his neck. The baby makes a sleepy noise. “This definitely your baby,” he says in a voice that suggests Stiles should be reassured by this news. “did someone say they switched your baby?”

“I do not have a baby,” Stiles says. She thinks she has entered a fugue state of sensibility, like if she keeps stating the obvious in a calm and collected manner the rest of the world will cease its insanity. “I have never had a baby. I will probably never have a baby.” Because I will probably die horribly of a monster attack before I can ever have sex, is the rest of her reasoning, but she refrains. 

“That’s not funny,” Scott says, and covers the baby’s ears with one hand. “you’ll give her a complex.”

“I’ve told you a million times,” Stiles says impatiently, “Dawn does not understand English. She cannot gain a complex.” Stiles eyes are suddenly heavy. She shakes her head sharply, thoughts like oil creeping across her brain; heavy, greasy, confusing.

Scott rolls his eyes. “Whatever. Why did you text me? Is she fussing again?”

Stiles feels something heavy roll over her eyes, like she’s been hit with five sugar crashes at once. She smells cotton candy, light and sticky sweet. “Yeah. I’ve been awake with her screaming every night for the past week.”

“You have your big test tomorrow,” Scott says, crossing the room to the old rocking chair set up in the corner. “let Uncle Scott bond with his best girl for a few hours.”

“Okay,” Stiles yawns. “but don’t read her anymore of your Aquaman trash. I want her to grow up big and strong, on Wonder Woman and the Black Widow.”

“Sshh,” Stiles hears Scott whisper and she dozes off to sleep. “don’t listen to Mommy, when the Aquaman movie comes out everyone will realize the truth of Arthur Curry.”

//

Stiles dreams of being pregnant. Scott and Isaac paint her room a soft bright yellow, like afternoon sunshine, and her dad drags her mom’s rocking chair out of the garage to oil it. Her stomach grows and swells until her belly button pops out, making Scott queasy every time he looks at it. Melissa washes Scott’s old baby blanket, fluffy purple and grey stripes, and lays it across the crib she liberated from the hospital store room. 

Every night Stiles lays her hands across the life inside her and tells the baby _I love you more than the sun and the moon_.

//

Stiles leaves the GED test area feeling like a champ. There’s no way she didn’t just blow that test out of the water. She hums, fumbling in her pocket for the jeep keys, and clicks through her phone’s shuffle playlist, looking for something to jam out to. When she gets to the jeep Derek is leaning against the driver’s side door. “Jesus!” Stiles yelps, one hand over her heart like an old Southern lady at a rock concert. “You scared me.”

Derek glowers at her in a hello. “There’s something wrong with Isaac,” he grunts. 

“No,” Stiles says in a tone drowning of sarcasm. “I cannot imagine that.”

“He’s knitting,” Derek continues, and now he sounds less homicidal, more bewildered. “Baby scarves?”

Stiles barks out a laugh. “Does he know we live in California? Dawn doesn’t need a scarf, she needs to not shit turds that would repel vampires faster than the Pope’s personal holy water.”

Derek’s eyebrows join forces in confusion on his forehead. “Dawn?”

Stiles rolls her eyes, yanking the back door open and throwing her bag in. “Yes, Derek, Dawn. My daughter, Dawn? The only baby Isaac knows, Dawn? The baby I live in fear of being kidnapped to be raised as Isaac and Scott’s gay adopted child, Dawn?” She shuts the door and turns to the driver’s side, only to be stopped by the thump of Derek’s hand on the car window, her chest leaning on his arm.

“Stiles,” Derek says, “you don’t have a daughter.” Stiles opens her mouth to reply and the world tilts sideways, spinning away. 

“Oh my god,” she says, and vomits into the handicap parking space next to her car. Her head pounds with the beat of her pulse, overwhelming loud. “Oh my god,” she repeats, and her hands shake. She falls, and Derek catches her.

//

Stiles dreams of giving birth. The pure, piercing, unbelievable _unending_ agony of it. She cries after, feeling torn open and aching and empty, the weight of her daughter on her chest. _I love you,_ she thinks to her baby, fierce and strong, tears soaking the pillow propping her up _I love you more than the sun and the moon_.

//

“What’s happening,” she croaks.

“You smell like dirt,” Derek says, and flicks at the turn signal on the steering wheel. “Your car is broken.”

“Signalling is for the weak,” Stiles replies automatically, then frowns. “I showered this morning. Asshole.”

“No,” Derek says, maneuvering the jeep easily across town towards Stiles’ house. “like… the earth. Mud and grass and moss. Tree sap and wildflowers.”

“Five more syllables,” Stiles says seriously, “Nature’s Haiku by Derek Hale.”

Derek’s hands tighten on the steering wheel (perfectly placed in the ten and two position, which may be the weirdest thing to happen to Stiles today). “Scott’s held the baby?”

“Yeah,” Stiles says, grounded by the familiar look on Derek’s face. It’s the one he wears when he’s fighting not to smash her face through plate glass. “My dad, Scott… and Isaac, I guess. I remember Isaac holding her, but it doesn’t--” She makes a frustrated noise. “I remember it but I don’t remember it.”

“False memories,” Derek says, and frowns even harder. “I don’t know what would be causing it.”

“Faeries,” Stiles says automatically, “leprechauns, pixies, witches, sprites, selkies.” At Derek’s look she shrugs. “I am Bestiary Girl.” She assesses that statement for a long pause. “Bestiary, not--”

“I know what Bestiary means,” Derek snaps. Stiles glares back.

“Well it’s important to me you don’t think the other thing,” she says, folding her arms across her chest. “Scott still looks at me funny.”

“Scott is an idiot,” Derek grunts.

Stiles examines a nail with exaggerated nonchalance. “True Alpha,” she singsongs under her breath. Her steering wheel creaks with the force of Derek’s hatred. 

They drive in silence the rest of the way to her house.

//

The baby is asleep, sprawled over her dad’s chest as he snores away at ESPN. Stiles kisses his cheek, scooping up the baby without waking either of them. “My room,” she whispers at Derek, and he pads silently behind her up the stairs. Stiles puts her hand on the doorknob to her room and stops.

“Do you smell that?” Derek asks. “A…. the fair?”

“Cotton candy,” Stiles says, pushing open the door and crossing the threshold. “I smelled it before, when--” Derek closes the door behind them and Stiles loses her train of thought with the click of the latch. Dawn fusses awake, her eyes scrunching.

“She’s hungry,” Derek says, “it’s close enough to feeding time.”

Stiles crosses the room to drop her bag, balancing Dawn in her other arm easily. “I keep the formula--”

“I remember,” Derek says, and makes her a bottle while Stiles changes her, pats on the baby powder and blows kisses into soft skin. She goes to wash her hands and comes back to Derek sitting on her bed with his feet propped up, Dawn in the crook of his elbow. His leather jacket is slung over her desk chair.

“You remembered to take your shoes off,” Stiles says, pleased. She climbs on the bed to join them, ungraceful. Dawn grumbles around her meal at the bouncing and Stiles sticks her tongue out.

“I don’t think she understands your insult,” Derek says seriously. Stiles flips him off and his lips twitch every so slightly upwards. Stiles slumps farther down into her bed and yawns.

“Fuck babies,” she mumbles, “I’m tired all the goddamn time.”

“So sleep,” Derek says. “I’ve got her for a while. I--” he frowns again. “I don’t remember what I came to ask you.”

Stiles pulls a blanket over their legs. “Wake me if you remember.”

//

Stiles dreams of being just barely pregnant, the smallest curve of her body. She lies flat on her back in the grass and runs her hands up and down her hips and ribs, feeling the swell where it used to be flat. “You’re going to be so loved,” she promises out loud, “more than all the stars in the sky.” The grass whispers to her in snatches of thought and feeling, the trees overhead twist their branches together to block her from the clouds. She draws on her belly with fingers smothered in fresh mud, protective sigils over and over again.

//

Stiles wakes up on her keyboard. “Blergh,” she mumbles. On her screen Netflix is inquiring if she’s still watching _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_. “No,” she says, and shuts her laptop. “Dawnie?” A breeze brings goosebumps to her skin--her window is open, and she always closes it before bed. She goes to the crib, her heart pounding, and Dawn’s soft sleeping face makes her panic ease. She traces a gentle finger across Dawn’s tufting hair, tickles her tiny palm. “Bedtime for bozos,” she half-sings, a teasing refrain her own mother used to say when she didn’t want to sleep. She steps to the bed and her bare foot squishes in something. 

She looks down. There’s green mud, a deep dark rich emerald, squishes into the fibers of her carpet and sticking between her toes.

//

By the time Derek gets there Dawn’s been crying for half an hour, and not even Uncle Scott’s Extra Great Bouncing Walk has lessened her distress. Isaac bailed fifteen minutes into the wailing, volunteering to protect the perimeter. Derek scrunches his face when he comes in the room. “Give her to me.”

Scott honest to god growls, his eyes glowing, and he turns his body away, shielding the baby with his own body. Derek’s teeth sharpen in response. Stiles plucks Dawn from the crook of Scott’s arm and plops her into Derek’s waiting hands. “No werewolf posturing in front of the baby,” she orders, “it’s toxic.”

Derek starts to do the bounce and walk, which in itself is enough to make Scott loose the train of his argument. “I tried that,” he says, sullen but not snarling. Derek starts to rumble in his chest, not a growl but a rolling, waxing and waning. Dawn stuffs her fist in her own mouth and drools around it, quieting.

With the sudden silence Stiles’ brain function returns. She finds a q-tip and a small envelope underneath some spare change in a drawer and swabs up some of the mud, drops it in and licks the envelope shut. “Maybe Deaton can help.” Derek snorts behind her, disbelieving. Stiles glares. “Well what are you contributing, Superwolf?”

“What do you smell?” Derek directs his question at Scott, who takes a deep breath, eyes shut.

“Baby,” he says, “and Stiles.”

Stiles sniffs herself discreetly. Being a teen mom is time consuming, and sometimes she naps instead of showers. 

“Try harder,” Derek says.

Scott squats near the mud splatters and inhales again. Stiles, heroically, refrains from any comparisons to bloodhounds. “It’s weird,” Scott says finally. “Like… mud.”

“That’s not weird.” Stiles bites her tongue when Derek shoots her a look.

Scott ignores her. “Mud and… sugar? Woodchips and seaweed.” He stands. “I don’t recognize anything about it.”

“Smells like magic,” Derek grunts. It’s hard for him to look as surly as he usually pulls off when there’s a tiny baby snoring into his neck.

Stiles shoves a pile of clothes off her desk chair to get at the baby sling. “Deaton,” she declares. “he’s in the reserve, the fishing cabin by Weccan Lake.”

“I know it,” Scott says. Stiles tosses Derek the baby sling and hands her keys over to Scott.

“You guys go change the baby. I need to put on a bra.”

 

 

The first time Stiles strapped Dawn into the carseat she had a panic attack. The simplest things scream danger to her, accidents she could walk away from but her baby wouldn’t. A fender bender damaging Dawn’s fragile skin, crushing her soft skull. Scott drives her around so she can sit in the back with Dawn, tensing at every merging of lanes and yellow light. Dawn doesn’t feel the same way, falling asleep as soon as the tires start to crunch down the driveway. 

Stiles leans her head on the hard plastic edge of the carseat and dozes despite herself, muscles tensing at every change of speed.

//

Stiles dreams she is not Stiles. She’s older but also younger, older in years than Stiles but younger among her own kind, and she so, so scared. She sees herself through the fae’s eyes, stretched out in her bed, and feels the magic leave the fae’s fingers while she feels it slip into her mind.

“I’m sorry,” she tells herself in her dream, “I’m sorry, I have to, please, please.” The room crawls with movement around her, turning over and things disappear and appear: crib, toys, diapers. She puts the baby into the crib and tucks the little wooden charm hanging on a leather cord into her onesie, the design picked from Stiles’ mind.

“I love you,” she whispers, and runs.

//

“Hm,” Deaton says, rubbing the mud sample between his fingertips. He touches it to his tongue and frowns. “Fae,” he announces, more directly than usual. “elemental.” He reaches for Dawn, slung snugly against Stiles’ torso, and she recoils. Derek shoves his way between them, glaring, and Scott snarls. “It’s protective,” Deaton says, unbothered by the waves of menace coming off the three of them. He makes a cross of the mud on Dawn’s forehead, like it’s Ash Wednesday and they’re fresh from church, and then dabs it on his own eyelids. Moss green rolls over his eyes, and he sucks in a sharp breath. He stares at Dawn like he’s never seen her before.

“What is it?” Stiles asks. She curls her body around Dawn, clutches her so close Dawn starts to grumble.

“Nothing,” Deaton says. “I need to run some tests. Go home. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

 

“He’s always so fucking _helpful_ ,” Stiles fumes, slamming the car door. Dawn starts to fuss in her seat, and Stiles hums to her, fighting her own anger.

“You shouldn’t be alone,” Derek says, standing at the passenger window. “I’ll stay here, see if I can find out some more from Deaton.”

“I’ll stay with Stiles,” Scott agrees, which, great. The only time they ever seem to come to a consensus is when it messes with Stiles’ personal freedom.

 

Scott changes into one of Stiles’ dad’s old t-shirts, proclaiming him property of the Sheriff’s department, and kicks his jeans off, leaving him in boxers. Stiles pulls the crib closer to the bed, on the opposite side of the window, and gives the attached mobile a gentle spin. Tiny spaceships wheel overhead, and Dawn blinks at them, focused and quiet, her eyelids heavy.

Stiles pees and splashes water on her face, finds a cleanish shirt hanging on the bathroom door hook and pajama bottoms on the bathroom floor. When she goes into the bedroom Scott is lying on top of her comforter, the pillow she used for her back during the pregnancy folded and shoved under his head. “This is why people think we’re together,” she says, climbing under the blanket. Scott’s side is radiating warmth, and Stiles leans into it.

“It only matters what Allison thinks,” Scott says, dopey in love. 

//

Scott proposed to her the night she called him, crying on her bathroom floor, the pregnancy test clutched in her fingers. She didn’t care her pee is on her skin, and she knew she wasn’t making any sense, but Scott got the message somehow because he ran up the stairs an hour later, twigs in his hair.

“Werewolf sleepover,” Stiles sniffled in protest. Scott had been camping out in the woods with Derek, finding his inner moon or some shit.

Scott’s shirt was on backwards, Stiles remembers, and he smelled like grass and sweat. He dug in his sweatpants and produced the circle of metal from a keychain, too big for her fingers. He kneeled and stammered something about her baby having a stable home, having pack. The utter shock of it had knocked Stiles out of her panic, and she boggled at him for a minute before throwing a cup of water in his face.

Sometimes after she strips simple flowers for ingredients she makes braided rings out of the stems and proposes to him at lacrosse practice, whenever he’s been particularly irritating and overly masculine in his protectiveness. Still, the memory of him picking her first, without talking to Allison first…. she figures it’ll go a long way when Scott makes her go with him to shop for promise rings.

//

Scott leaves in the morning to go to school, and Derek climbs through the window ten minutes after. He tosses a breakfast burrito at Stiles’ face and shakes shiny things at Dawn while Stiles slogs through some of his online coursework. “You’re good with her,” Stiles says during a Dawn feeding break, able to hold her, the bottle, and a book on computer programming at the same time.

“Younger siblings,” is all Derek says, but it’s enough to send Stiles on a guilt trip. She burps Dawn and passes her back to Derek. Dawn falls asleep in the crib and Derek wanders in and out of the field of Stiles’ attention, finding an old copy of Vonnegut in Stiles’ bathroom, finding a bag of cheesy chips in Stiles’ sock drawer. Half an hour after school lets out he climbs out of the window without a word and passes Allison climbing in.

“Seriously?” Stiles says. “The front door works, you know.”

“Yeah,” Allison says cheerily, unslinging her bow from her shoulder and leaning it against the wall. “Lydia’s using it now.”

“It’s locked,” Stiles points out.

“It was,” Lydia agrees, coming through the doorway. “I locked it again behind me.”

Stiles rolls her eyes. Dawn, sensing Princess Sunshine Allison, gurgles, waving her stubby arms, and Allison scoops her up to swoop her around the room and coo. “Tell me,” Stiles faux-wonders, “do woodland animals sing whenever you’re near?”

“Yes,” Allison says in a baby voice, “and then I shoot them and skin them and roast them over the campfire for Uncle Scott, yes I do. First we--” she raises Dawn in the air and then swoops her low to the floor, creating a wave of giggling infant joy, “--drain aaaaalllll the blood! Then--”

“I’m glad you guys are here,” Stiles says, rather eager not to hear the rest of Allison’s fairytale, and puts Dawn in the crib with a few shiny things that rattle when she punches them. She gives them a quick rundown of what happened the night before, shoving some things around to create a space for the two of them to sit.

“Deaton,” Lydia says darkly. “I haven’t had any… visions, if that’s what you were wondering.”

“No,” Stiles says. She opens a desk drawer and takes out a shallow bowl of the mud she’d scraped off the carpet while Scott slept, a vial of deep springwater she’d swiped from Deaton’s office the last time she was there, and an eyedropper. “I’m going to put it on my eyes, like Deaton did, and find out what he saw.”

Lydia nods, approving, but Allison frowns. “Are you sure we shouldn’t wait for Scott or Derek?” The fact that she even mentions Derek without threateningly caressing an arrowhead speaks to how real her concern is, but Stiles is determined. 

“If there’s something wrong with my baby I need to know.”

“Okay good,” Lydia says. “Let’s do it.” She and Allison share a complicated look, some kind of girl code Stiles has never been privy too. She’s been Scott’s friend and Scott her only friend since the second grade, withdrawing into the comfort of his bromance, and is only just breaching what girl friendship means. But Lydia and Allison have this calm, no-nonsense, do what needs to be done attitude that Stiles really needs right now, more than Scott’s hovering.

She rehydrates the mud carefully, mixing with a toothpick, and finally has something approaching the consistency Deaton had used.

“Narrate what you see as you see it,” Lydia instructs. Allison tests the string of her bow, turning an arrow in her fingers and putting her back to a corner.

“Okay,” Stiles says, and dabs the mud on her eyelids. It’s like a filter over her vision, casting everything seafoam green and slightly distorted, like she’s underwater. She casts a quick glance over the room and stops when she gets to Lydia. Instead of perfect makeup and copper hair there is wet black curls, sloppy and knotted, floating around a grim reaper skull, black holes where there should be eyes and jagged, crooked teeth jutting from an oversized jaw. Stiles recoils, falling to the floor.

“Stiles?” the skull asks, and it’s wearing Lydia’s polka dotted dress, her kitten heels. “What do you see?”

The answer rips its way from Stiles’ throat before his brain recognizes what the word means. “Banshee.”

Lydia flips her hair, which in this form is almost hilariously terrifying. “Tell us something we don’t know.”

“Dawn,” Allison’s voice reminds her, and Stiles looks at her before she can stop herself. Allison is almost herself, at first glance. At second glance there is blood on her hands, dripping from her quiver. There’s a necklace of lupine teeth around her neck and designs shaved into her hair, standing stark white against her scalp. She’s barefoot, and anklets of wolfsbane drag on the floor.

 _Hunter_ echoes in Stiles’ mind, but she bites back the naming and goes to the crib, afraid to look down.

“Stiles,” Lydia says firmly, and as long as Stiles doesn’t look at her it’s comforting instead of terrifying.

Stiles looks at Dawn and her breath catches. Dawn is…. green, as green as the mud on Stiles’ eyes, like a baby Hulk, if the Hulk had big fox ears and claws like itty bitty razorclaws instead of fingers. There are twin thumps behind her and Stiles spins around. Her vision snaps back with a clap like thunder and her hands fly to cover her ears as she shouts with pain. There’s a girl standing in front of her with braided hair and a pleated white dress. Lydia and Allison lie prone on the floor, eyes closed. There’s an arrow embedded in the wall.

“I really wish you hadn’t done that,” the girl said. She touches a single fingertip to the space between Stiles’ eyes and the world falls away.

//

Once Derek had climbed through her window and stepped over Scott asleep on the floor. “I don’t know if I can help you anymore,” Stiles had whispered from where she’s frozen, standing against the wall like it’s the only thing holding her up, her hands pressed to her belly, waiting for the little kicks that remind her the baby’s still alive. Her whole body was shaking, and her leg hurt from where the Wendigo had slashed her, sixteen stitches by Deaton’s steady hands and Isaac’s hand-holding painkiller. 

“I know,” Derek said, and then, “I’m sorry.” He’s so rarely apologized, or even spoken to Stiles in a voice that’s soft and not angry, that she’d been jolted out of her panic. He walked to her and kneeled like he’d been shot, his head falling hard against her hip, below the curve of her belly, her baby girl. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Stiles said, even though it wasn’t. Ever the fixer, she groped for his hand, pressed it against her skin, up under her shirt. “Do you feel her?” Pliant and agreeable, the baby kicked against their joined hands.

Derek breathed against her, damp and heavy. His shoulder flexed under her other hand. “She is protected,” he said, and it sounded like a rite, a vow, a promise. “On my pack, She is protected.”

//

There’s a girl sitting in a meadow. She has long tangled black hair, curly and twisted, and her skin is brown like mud, glistening like water, with a deep greenish tint, like leaves in the rainforest. Stiles steps into the clearing, grass silky with dew slipping between her toes. She lowers herself to the ground across from the girl and sits cross-legged.

“I’m not a girl,” the girl says, “but you keep thinking of me like I am.”

“I guess,” Stiles says. Their voices sound really loud in the silence. “you still look like a girl to me, so I still think of you like one.”

“Curiously small-minded of you,” the girl says, and Stiles realizes when she hears the girl speak her mouth doesn’t move. It’s suddenly a little easier not to think of her as a human girl. “How is she, my daughter?” Her eyes are painfully bright, desperate.

“I love her,” Stiles says, a touch devastated herself. 

The fae girl bares her teeth, narrow and pointed and emerald green. “She’s not yours.”

Stiles sweeps her arms out wide and frustrated. “You made her mine! I _remember_ her, being pregnant with her.” She digs her fingers into her hair, a wild nest of flyways only four inches long. “I cut my hair when she started to kick. I threw up everyday exactly at nine thirty-two for weeks. Scott and I ate peanut butter tuna sandwiches and pickled prunes.” Stiles’ voices breaks, rough and ragged. “I named her Dawn.”

“None of that happened,” the fae says.

Stiles screams, a noise of pain and rage and frustration ripped straight from her chest, hollowing out her heart. “ _It happened to me_.”

“I’m almost ready,” the fae says. “Would you kill my baby just to spite me?”

“You’re going to take her away,” Stiles says, wooden.

“A week,” the fae promises, “and your life will go back. You won’t even remember.”

She reaches for Stiles’ forehead and Stiles grabs her wrist. “I’ll stop you.”

“You can try,” the fae agrees, and flicks Stiles across the nose.

 

Stiles wakes up in her bed, pond scum under her nails and in her hair. Lydia groans from the floor and Allison sits straight upright, coming awake with a knife in her hand. “What the hell?” The fae girl stands in the middle of the room.

“One week from today,” she says, “and I come for my child.” Allison throws the knife at her and it passes around her, bending like Beckham until the fae snatches it right out of the air. “Cute,” the fae says, and licks the blade. Her tongue leaves mossy residue on the metal. She turns to the crib and her face shifts from inhuman to something uniquely recognizable: longing. 

On the floor, Lydia sucks in a lungful of air and screams and screams and _screams_ , her voice ringing in a screech that rises in pitch and volume until Stiles is pressing her hands over her ears. Blood trickles against her palms. Through squinted eyes she sees the fae snarl, pained, and then vanish.

 

Stiles fumbles on the nightstand for her cellphone, her ears ringing with phantom echoes. “I need to talk to Deaton.”

//

Stiles calls a war council. Then she calls Pizza Hut.

Isaac claims a cheese for himself and sits on Stiles’ bed with his shoes on. Derek, on his way to intercept a sausage supreme, lays a hinting hand on his shoulder, and Isaac sighs, kicking off his sneakers. Scott, the best friend that he is, brings Stiles mushrooms and olives. Allison, in an attempt to regain whatever control she feels she lost the last time she was in Stiles’ room, is sharpening a machete instead of eating, and Lydia produces a salad from her purse.

“Deaton says she is powerful, probably from a long line of earth fae,” Stiles says, squinting at the page of notes Deaton had given her over the phone. “another reason the spell is so strong is because it’s going to snap back when it’s finished. One week.”

“I don’t see the issue,” Isaac says, “she’s not yours. She’s not even human.”

Stiles doesn’t realize she’s launched herself across the bed at him until Derek’s arms close around her waist and haul her back. “Isaac,” Scott says, deeply disappointed. Isaac, to his credit, looks uncomfortably apologetic. “This pack is behind you, Stiles,” Scott promises, and it’s only because Stiles is pressed against Derek, from her ankles to her shoulders, that she feels him tremble to be called pack again.

“When I was pregnant you were scared of my bellybutton,” she says viciously, and Isaac flushes. Allison giggles.

“We could tell my dad,” she offers, and Stiles’ stomach turns.

“No. Dawn’s not human.” And Stiles doesn't trust Chris Argent around anything, human or non-human, not as far as she can throw him.

“Bunker,” Derek contributes with a grunt. “If the spell snaps back we just have to make it past the deadline.”

Scott nods. "We have a lot of work to do."

//

“Who was it,” Scott had begged her to tell him, “this is my duty as your best friend.”

“Relax Neanderwolf,” Stiles dismissed, “I don’t need a knight in shining armor, I need someone to hide my dad’s guns.”

Scott’s hands cracked the kitchen countertop. His eyes were red. “Sorry Stiles, I know. I’ve got all these instincts…” he trailed off, breathing hard, and his fingers turned to claws. He looked suddenly wounded. “You didn’t even tell me you had… you know.”

Stiles shifted, uncomfortable. “Well it wasn’t something I really…. wanted to talk about.”

Scott roared, ripping the fake granite right off the wooden frame and throwing it against the wall with a crash. “ _I’ll kill him_!”

Stiles ducked, automatic. “Jesus Christ! Not if your mom kills you first. And it’s not like that. It was just. Forgettable. Everyone says your first time is this huge deal, and I just remember thinking ‘is this seriously it?’ Doesn’t live up to the hype.”

Scott took several deep breaths, his eyes fading. He scratched the back of his head, looking at the mess of his kitchen. “It did with me and Allison. Maybe you need to find the right person.”

“Maybe,” Stiles had agreed.

“Maybe you’re gay for Lydia,” Scott suggested.

“Eh,” Stiles said. She was pretty sure of that already.

“Asexual?”

“I masturbate waaay too much for that.”

Scott scrunched his nose up. “I support you whatever you decide,” he promised. “Uh, do you think your dad will let me borrow some tools?”

Stiles patted him on the bicep. “If you ask right after I break the news, I’m pretty sure you could get the deed to the house and his badge.”

//

Two days to go and Scott is readying for war. They picked the Hale house, as burned out and depressing as it is, based on Deaton’s recommendation that they need somewhere steeped in pack magic, pack ties to combat faerie spells. Stiles and Lydia draw every protective sigil and rune from every book Allison can dig up. Allison gives her these little sleeves she can velcro under her sleeves and around her ankles, and then little sharp knives to keep in them. “Iron,” she says. “good for faeries.”

Stiles tells her dad she’s going to a sleepover at Lydia’s with Allison, and waits until he leaves for work. She opens his gun locker and triple checks the safety on a pistol before shoving into the back of her jeans.

Derek drives her, and at the turn-off to the house he stops. “We could run,” he offers. “it’s possible her power is centered here.”

Stiles drums her fingers against the armrest. “Where would we go?”

“New York,” Derek says, staring resolutely out the windshield. “I’ve done it before.”

In the rearview mirror, Stiles can see Dawn chewing on her fingers. “You would do that again? For Dawn?”

“For Dawn,” Derek agrees. “For you.”

It’s closer to a statement than Stiles is ready for. “Hey, remember when you threatened to rip my throat out with your teeth and then we told Danny we were banging?”

“ _You_ told Danny,” Derek corrects, grumpy again. Stiles chews on a thumbnail, and jumps when Derek touches her knee, hesitant. “You’re pack. We’ll protect you.”

Stiles stares at his hand on her leg. “Thanks.” It seems inadequate, but she doesn’t think he’s ever touched her like this before, gentle. Intimate. She tried to be more articulate. “Thanks for the offer.”

Derek huffs something that might be a laugh. He shakes his head, lips quirked, like he can’t fucking believe that Stiles is a real person. “I should have known better. Running isn’t like you.”

“You could say it isn’t my _Stile_ ,” Stiles says, because her coping mechanism is shitty humor. 

Derek’s eye twitches at the pun, silence stretching out, and then smiles at her, sudden and swift, gone in a second, but Stiles sees it, the lift in cheeks. His teeth are white and very straight. His eyes crinkle at the corners.

//

“Lydia,” Stiles had read at the baby shower, “beauty, princess.” She flipped through the baby name book, bought from the impulse magazine rack from the drugstore when they did a run for chips and ice cream, Allison sitting up during a Netflix marathon and declaring that Stiles needs a baby shower. 

Lydia makes a derisive, cutting sound. “That came later. The name dates to St. Lydia, Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 16. Do you know what effectual calling is?”

Stiles sunk further into Lydia’s soft, soft couch, sighing as the pressure on her bladder very slightly eased. She’s still giggling over what happened at the drugstore, Lydia pressing her hands on Stiles’ belly with wide innocent eyes and reassuring her loudly that the DNA test will be able to tell which boy was the father, just to make Allison smile into her fingers and the cashier go white. 

“No,” Allison responded patiently, shaking a bag of M&Ms over the bowl of popcorn for Stiles, because she’s a wonderful person and friend. “What is it?”

Lydia went from fiery to dark and broody faster than Derek on a rampage. “Someone reaches into your heart and mind and opens it for someone else to use.”

Her statement killed the party vibe fairly effectively. Allison left the television muted on a rerun of Battlestar Galactica and sat next to Lydia, their legs pressed together. She poured Lydia a glass of white wine. “Allison,” Stiles read to break the tension. “of noble bearing. A little Ally?”

Allison pulled a face. “Actually I always wished I had something more unique. What about a variant of your name?”

“Veto,” Lydia said, snapping out of her mood. “I can’t let you do that to an unborn child.”

“Way ahead of you,” Stiles agreed. “We don’t need a Stiles for every generation.” She flipped through book and read one aloud every so often, when it struck her. _Owen, Welsh, warrior. Abrial, French, protected._

Allison unmuted the television and trailed comforting fingers through the ends of Lydia’s hair when no one was looking. Stiles touched her turned out bellybutton and promised her baby unconditional support, always, to protect her with her own life, forever. _Amata, Italian, beloved._

//

“Spark,” Stiles whispers, a plea, sitting cross legged in the basement, where the fire started. There’s ash smeared all over her clothes, dark smudges on her forearms. Her hands shake as she makes circles of protection around herself; salt and iron fillings, fresh crushed raspberries and garlic and cloves, braided ivy stems, violet petals and the seeds of every hot pepper available in farmer’s markets in a 25 mile radius. She kisses Dawn’s eyelids, “Mama’s sparking, baby.” She pours her will, her want, her pleas, begs the universe please, god, let me keep my daughter.

She checks her watch. The basement smells like fire still, like wolfsbane and and melted fiberglass. Splinters, wooden struts, and metal bars just from the walls like jagged teeth, insulation spilling out and littering the floor. Underneath the burnt wood and chemical tones, sometimes Stiles thinks she can smell death and rot and fear. It’s half an hour until the deadline, and Stiles dips her fingers in the last of the fae’s mud, dabs it on her eyes and uses it to trace the protective symbols she’s carved into the floor around her circles.

The stairs creak. “Stiles?” It’s Derek, and Stiles casts her eyes to the side as he thumps down to her. She doesn’t want to know what he looks like with faerie sight across her eyes like a veil. “We’re taking positions. Are you ready?”

Stiles eases the slim braid over Dawn’s head, the wooden charm dangling, a thundermark carved into a wooden circle. It somewhat resembles a snowflake, the inside of the design darkened by deliberate scorching. Her mother had thundermark earrings, was buried in them. Her human heritage dangling around the neck a earth fae foundling. “Yes.” She holds it out and his fingers brush her when he takes it. He jogs up the stairs to give it to Scott, their hopes hanging on a leather thread--that she’ll be tricked, go to Scott first, Scott and Isaac and Allison up a tree with a duffel bag of Lydia’s homemade explosives and her biggest baddest compound bow.

Stiles checks her watch. Twenty nine minutes, Jesus Christ. Derek comes down the stairs again and Stiles looks at Dawn, holding her close. She’s wearing a camisole that’s riding up her ribs, and she presses Dawn to her skin to feel her warmth, the tickle of her hair. When she kisses her the baby smell settles her, makes her calm. Derek sits behind her, to the side. Stiles hears paper, pages of a book moving against each other.

Derek clears his throat. “The dragons are singing tonight.”

Stiles looks at him before she can stop herself, surprise punching through her chest hard enough to knock her brain function out of the way. She’d be lying if she said she hadn’t thought about what he would look like after seeing Lydia and Allison, and in bed staring at the ceiling thinking about how Dawnie was never really hers…. she imagined him in shadow and on fire, burned and still smoking, glowing like volcano under cracked rock. Whatever magic the mud might have ever had is long gone, however, and he just looks like Derek, scowly frown face and creaky leather jacket. His hair is wet from a shower and he hasn’t bothered to dry and style it. It makes him look younger.

He’s holding a book Stiles’ mother used to read to her when she was in the hospital, frail arms helping Stiles crawl on the stiff bed, the tubes in her arms tangling in Stiles’ long messy hair. “Where did you get that?”

“From your house.” Derek says, running a gentle finger down the spine. There used to be a dust jacket, Stiles remembers, but she doesn’t know what happened to it. Is that what it will be like when Dawn is gone? She won’t remember having a daughter, but she’ll feel that ripped out feeling in her chest, like someone reached in and hollowed out her ability to ever feel anything at all. Stiles doesn’t say anything, clutching Dawn a little closer, tight enough she fusses. Derek doesn’t seem to take it personally. “The dragons are singing tonight,” he continues, “awake in their lairs underground.”

It stirs Stiles’ memory, and she says the next line, her voice hoarse and low and lacking her usual energy. “To sing in cacophonous chorus.” Derek joins her, measured and matching her pace perfectly. “And fill the world with their sound.”

They read Dawn the poem Stiles recited at her mother’s funeral, in the place where Derek’s family burned.

//

Stiles remembers being in labor. Her water had broken in the morning, standing at the counter watching the toaster oven heat up, wincing from what she thought had been cramps and gas. She texted her dad and called Scott, who was particularly pleased she had managed to hold out until second period so he could skip out on Chemistry. Her dad’s driving a prisoner transfer, no cell phone checks, so she tries to remember what she’s read on the internet about breathing techniques to ease the pain.

Derek banged on her door, and when she didn’t manage to (while in labor) cross swiftly to the front door and open it in five seconds he kicked it off the hinges. “What if I’d been standing right there?” she screeched, bent double. 

“You weren’t,” he said, and helped her to the Jeep.

He drove like a grandma on her way to church who hasn’t updated her prescription in fifteen years. “I love this car,” Stiles panted, “but I do not want to have a baby in it.”

“You’re fragile,” Derek said, tight and stiff, “and in pain.”

“Oh my god,” Stiles groaned through another contraction, “why do werewolf instincts always punish me?”

Derek reaches across the gearshift and grips her wrist loosely, his veins standing out black and spider and he eases her pain away and takes it into himself.

//

Stiles knows the fae is there when Derek’s face goes tight and then suddenly slack, slumped over before he can even shift. The fae steps out of a long shadow by the stairs and sways towards Stiles. Where she walks she leaves flowers sprouting in her footsteps. “Foolish girl,” she says, and her voice is musical like a long slow waltz, “tonight I’m the strongest I have ever been.”

She stops at Stiles’ circles and an expression moves over her face like a wave. Stiles thinks it might be surprise, but it’s hard to tell on an inhuman face. Stiles closes her eyes. If she’s ever been magical in her whole life, now’s the fucking time.

The fae crouches and draws a claw across the lines of her plants and salt and iron and herbs, breaking the circles. When Stiles looks at her through tears she looks almost kind. “You feel what I feel,” she says quietly. “she was mine before she was ever yours. The pain you remember, passing her through your own body, the life growing warm inside you? It’s my pain, my memory. It was never yours until I gave it to you.”

Stiles pulls her body around Dawn’s as a weak shield of flesh and bone. “Why?”

Dawn makes a noise of distress, picking up on Stiles fear and anguish, and the fae makes a whirring, clicking sound, quieting her. “Her father is from a warring clan, and I am the heir. There was business to attend to, and she needed to be safe. This territory is outside of the fae. It smells like wolves and Hunters. No one would look for her here.”

Dawn makes that whirr-click sound, a mimicking chirp, and when Stiles looks at her, she can see, just a for a second, Dawn’s true form. “Why me?” her voice sounds like broken bottles, brittle glass.

“Magic works better on humans than the wolf packs,” she says, “but you still have pack magic--you fought at first.” She reaches out her hands and rests them under Dawn’s swaddled body. When she speaks again her voice is gentle. “I am indebted to you, and not ungrateful. I didn’t harm any of your wolves. But she is mine, and I am leaving with her.”

Stiles shakes her head, her eyes blurring. “No.”

“When I leave you will not remember,” the fae says, “I am powerful, but not so much. What goes up must come down. A spell like this cannot last, and the effects do not linger. Your pain will be short and soft.”

Dawn reaches short arms out, smiling at her mother, and gurgles. Like she’s standing outside her body, Stiles sees herself pass the baby into the fae’s arms and press a last kiss to her chubby cheek. By the time she comes back to herself the fae is half into the shadow she came from, her face aglow with happiness. “I don’t want to forget,” Stiles asks, her last request. “please.”

The fae hesitates, and when she replies she sounds regretful for the first time over what she’s done. “I would if it could be done. Don’t fret, sister-mother. Your life returns in a hundred beats of your heart.” She steps into the shadow and disappears.

Derek sits up and growls at no one. He blinks, then scrambles wildly to his feet. “Stiles!” he falls to the ground beside her and wraps an arm around her shoulders. “Where’s Dawn?”

“Gone,” Stiles says hollowly, the gun untouched in her pants, and when he moves to stand she grips his wrist. “no, Derek.” Underneath the grief and the loss there’s a desperate, stricken idea stirring. “Come here.” She pulls his face close to hers and he lets her, confused. “Think about her,” Stiles says, “her--her smell, her clothes, her voice. Remember changing her diapers, and making her laugh, and how she kicked against your hand on my skin.”

“Okay,” Derek says, furrow between his eyes. Stiles closes her own eyes, and lets her babble run from her brain to her tongue.

“Laugh like a water fountain in a public park, bubbly and loud and easy to find,” she says, “but my god your shit smelled worse than the locker room after lacrosse practice, you had hair like mine, your necklace looked like my mother’s earrings.” She falters, aware of her heart thundering away, a timer counting down from one hundred. 

“She fell asleep on the highway and cried at redlights,” Derek says, chiming in, “Scott bought baby food too early and ate all the mushed peas, Lydia taught you how to make a bottle.”

The memories bolster Stiles and she rushes, feeling the timer get closer and closer to zero. “Remember,” she whispers, “remember when you slept on my chest, your face against mine? When I dipped my finger in tomato sauce and let you suck it off when Dad wasn’t looking? Remember when you peed on me the first time you smiled? I do. I remember all of it. _I remember you_.” She kisses Derek on the last sound, muffled against his breath. His hands come up and she grabs the front of his jacket, afraid he’s pushing her away, but instead his hand cradles her head, the back of her neck. His other hand slides to the small of her back, skin against skin.

Stiles pulls every memory of Dawn, every time she sat on the closed toilet lid and sobbed because she hadn’t slept in two days and Dawn wouldn’t stop crying, people staring and judging as she cleaned out her locker and withdrew from high school. She remembers every moment where she marveled at Dawn’s ten fingers and ten toes, each wondering thought: _I did that, me_. She takes it all and the slide of Derek’s tongue against hers, and there’s a sound like a hundred balloons all popping at once.

And then nothing.

//

She was in labor for four hours, and Melissa McCall got out of bed after an all night shift on two hours of sleep to sit in the delivery room with her and hold her hand. “It was much worse with Scott,” she’d assured Stiles, “sixteen hours, can you imagine? That’s as many hours as years he’s been alive.”

After the doctors washed her up and wrapped her up and cleaned Stiles up they roll Dawn in on this little cart with a plastic bubble top. They lifted her out and fit her gently into Stiles’ arms.

“Say hi to mommy,” the nurse cooed.

“Hi baby,” Stiles had whispered to her alien face, red and wrinkled and scrunched, her eyes still shut. “Hi, Dawnie.”

//

No one remembers except for Stiles and Derek, not even Deaton. He frowned when they explained it to him, and then kicked them all out to document it, muttering darkly about meddling faeries and their twisty magic rules, and the idiot nerve of Stiles to go sparking around in the middle of an elemental memory spell. “Sorry,” Stiles tells Derek in the parking lot. “I needed a boost, I think, and you were the only one around.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Derek says, and gives her a ride home.

The stretch marks on Stiles’ belly are gone or, she supposes, were never really there. Gone too are the carseat, the boxes of formula, the crib, the bottles, the lumpy scarf Scott knitted Dawn in Home Economics. But the baby book is still lying under Stiles’ bed, some names ticked in black or blue gel ink, and her dad finds a clean diaper in the pantry, which prompts an odd conversation which Stiles derails by describing in great detail studies and statistics surrounding the effectiveness of various sexual education programs.

Stiles and Scott scrub her room out, Scott scrambling to intercept anything he perceives as remaining baby items and hiding them before they can spiral Stiles into a panic attack that leaves her curled in the fetal position in a corner, keening. There are empty frames scattered around with no pictures in them, and Stiles stacks them on a bookshelf, in the spaces where baby and pregnancy books were, for a short time. She knocks a book out of place and a photograph flutters out, spinning dust into the air.

It’s the first (and now only) picture of them, Stiles in a hospital gown and Dawn still looking like she hadn’t all the way finished becoming a human before Stiles had pushed her out into the world. “Wow,” Scott says softly, coming up next to her and boggling. “She’s really cute,” Scott offers, unsure. “She looks like you.” She really doesn’t, but it’s such pure Scott that Stiles chokes on a smile. 

“You were a really good Uncle,” Stiles says, fumbling for a tissue to blow her nose.

“Yeah?” Scott sits on her bed and pulls Stiles down with him. “Stiles, it’s okay to be sad.”

Stiles leans her head into Scott’s shoulder and takes unsteady breaths. “I am. I am sad.”

Scott’s voice is choked up, brought to tears without a single memory to back it up, sorrow because Stiles is hurting. “I’m sad too. It’ll be okay, Stiles.”

//

Stiles wakes up for school one day and goes back to sleep instead. She wakes again at noon and pulls the picture out from her pillow. She drives to the Hale house and goes into the basement. When she guarded herself against the spell her protective circles and burst into blue flames, scorching through the floorboards, the foundation, the dirt. She steps around them, careful, and sits in the middle, the picture in her lap.

“Stiles,” Derek says from the foot of the stairs.

“Maybe it would have been better,” Stiles says like they’ve been having a conversation. “if I’d let myself forget.” Derek walks over and stops in front of her, his boots in her field of view. “Then I wouldn’t feel this way.” It feels like a betrayal, wishing she could forget. 

Derek holds out a hand. “Come with me.”

//

They crunch through the forest, and Stiles thinks that now the pack’s stable it’s beautiful again, the way it was when she was a little kid. The sunlight dapples through the leaves, and Derek leads her down a trail, between the trunks and fallen leaves. He doesn’t talk, but his fingers stay looped around her wrist, guiding her here and there, and after ten minutes she links their fingers together. Another ten minutes and he holds branches to the side so she can slip through into a open space, ringed by thick trees and filled with grass and small plants.

Derek slows to walk beside her instead of in front of her, and they walk to the center of the grave. There’s a chunk of granite sunk into the ground, the area around it clean of weeds.There’s a pawprint etched into the stone, like it was scratched there by wolf claws. Derek lets go of her hand to kneel and brush the stone off, his fingers lingering on the pawprint. “Laura,” is all he says. Stiles reaches out, hesitant, and lays her hand on his shoulder. He reaches up and takes her hand again, standing. He pulls something from under his jacket--a thin but sturdy piece of polished stone.

“Dawn isn’t dead,” Stiles says, “she just wasn’t mine.”

“She was real to you,” Derek says. “and she’s dead to you now.” Stiles recoils, shaking her head, but Derek presses on. “Even if you saw her again, even though she’s still alive, she isn’t who she was to you. That person is dead.” His voice breaks when he talks, and Stiles thinks about what Peter must have been like before the fire, that Derek keeps giving him chances for betrayal.

She walks around the glade, Derek trailing her, until she finds a place that’s out of the shade, a quiet spot where the dirt is sun-hot against her hand. Derek helps her push the stone into the ground where it won’t be disturbed, and then he grows one claw out long and sharp so she can use his finger like an awkward pen, writing _Dawn Claudia Stilinkski_ in her own looping cursive. She blows across the carving to get the shavings out of the way, and uses her sleeve to shine it up. She sits back. “A song I can only hear one night a year,” she murmurs, tracing the words with a fingertip, “the dragons are sleeping tonight.” She kisses her daughter’s name and plucks a plant as she stands and shows it to Derek.

“Sweetgrass,” she tells him, “good for keeping away bad spirits. Purifying.” Dawn’s picture is in her pocket.

Derek looks back to where Laura is buried. “Good.”

//

They lie in the shade on the edge of the glade, under a leafy tree. A root digs into Stiles’ side so she scoots closer to Derek’s bulky warmth. He takes off his jacket and lays it over them, his arm under her head. “When you were looking up baby names,” he says, and Stiles thinks, _Dawn, Anglo-Saxon, awakening_ , “did you see mine?” His voice is on the edge of bitter, and Stiles thinks she knows why: _Derek, English, gifted ruler_ a king name for a beta wolf, a failed Alpha.

“Yeah,” she says, leaning her head against his soft shirt. He smells like pack. “Derek, Germanic, power of the tribe.” She rests a hand on his bicep. “Do you even lift?” Derek smiles again, the one that lights up his face, and Stiles touches the crinkles around his eyes. “What does it mean about you, that you think I’m funny?”

“I’m laughing at you, not with you,” Derek informs her.

“Mm,” Stiles noses at the fabric of his shirt. She can hear birds, and squirrels, the wind through the leaves. When she thinks about Dawn she doesn’t want to punch her fist through a glass door, and that’s progress. Maybe tomorrow she’ll respond to Allison’s text, get the homework she’s been ignoring from Lydia, let them pull her out for a girl’s night and a bitch session.

For right now there’s Derek, here and warm next to her, the only other person who remembers Dawn, and there’s Stiles, human and understanding and the only other person Derek has ever taken to Laura’s grave. And for right now, it feels like enough.


End file.
